


Better the Devil you know

by JustAKeepsake



Series: Warlock Dowling - Comedy of Errors [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Apologies in advance to anyone named Thaddeus, Stand Up, Warlock as John Mulaney
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:55:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26255257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAKeepsake/pseuds/JustAKeepsake
Summary: Yes, I had a Nanny growing up and I think she was the devil.OK so that’s a touch dramatic, I don't think she was THE devil, that a bit egocentric of me really, I'm not claiming that The Devil took time out of their busy schedule of to babysit me for the first half a dozen years of my life, but I'm just saying that there were a lot of strange goings on around me that I thought were pretty normal at the time.
Series: Warlock Dowling - Comedy of Errors [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1939261
Comments: 8
Kudos: 57





	Better the Devil you know

**Author's Note:**

> Long time lurker, first time poster, in fact, I’ve been lurking for a long time now, but I’ve been pacing myself and could lurk for the rest of the night if necessary with still enough stamina left for a final burst of lurking around dawn!
> 
> I saw a wonderful tumblr post about what Warlock might be like if he grew up to be a John Mulaney-esque comedian and I couldn’t stop thinking about it! I've tried not to take any too direct quotes from John Mulaney’s shows but the general tone of voice and stage presence. Although I think Aziraphale and Crowley having the quack like a duck conversation is hilarious and so absolutely feasible!

Good evening everybody, how’rey’all doing tonight? Having a good time? Good. 

Welcome to the show, my name is Warlock Dowling and well be spending the next hour or so in each other’s wonderful company. I can’t promise things won’t get a little weird, but welcome.

So, Warlock right? It is my real name, I get that A LOT, but it’s odd name though isn’t it, I'm told it’s Old English. So you might not’ve heard of me before, that’s fine, don’t be embarrassed, I’m pretty new to stand up so I’m not offended, but maybe you've heard of my father. He was the American Ambassador to the UK about 10 years ago. 

Thaddeus Dowling.

Yes that's right people, Thaddeus. 

I can't imagine growing up with the name Thaddeus, children can be so cruel. Must've been terrible for my father really. So when I was born I'm sure he said to my mother ‘give our sweet boy a nice name, so he won't get picked on, like I was. You remember, how I told you how tough my childhood was? How the other kids picked on me for having the name Thaddeus?’

And dear old mom said ‘of course dear I wouldn't want to make it any harder for him in this big scary world’ and dad said ‘that’s a relief, what a load off my mind’. But then dad, who was abroad at the time, comes back to meet new born baby me for the first time and mom said ‘Hello dear, meet Warlock’. 

I can only imagine the reaction, ‘Harriet, darling, I thought we said strong, model name, like Mark or John, or biblical you know like Adam or Luke. Hundreds of good names in the bible’

‘Ah yes!’ Says my mother ‘I know that's what we said, but the nuns suggested Warlock, so you know, Warlock.’

And don't worry people I'll get back to the nuns. 

And that is how Thaddeus Dowling, US Ambassador has a son named Warlock. And what a magnificent time I’ve had with that name, I’ve tried to roll with the punches, own it, you know.

So it's great to be here in America, I actually grew up in England, Great Britain if you will, not that that you can really hear it in my accent.

I had far as I can remember I had a pretty standard childhood, my parents are American, lived their lives, met each other, fell in love, a twinkle in papa's eye and then 9 months later I was born as most Americans are, in a convent in England, Europe, thousands of miles away. 

Oh? You weren't? just me then, don't worry I'll get back to that bit, and then like most people I stayed there until I was 11, my parents were pretty distant to I was mostly raised by my Nanny and the gardener and then my tutors, and if can be honest with you I think the 4 of them were 2 people in disguise. Does that just sound crazy? Tell me, no I can take it, doesn't that just sound crazy to you? 

Oh yes, the convent, it was a dark and stormy night and my mother, heavily pregnant at an airbase in a tiny village in England, and I mean tiny. This is like 40yrs behind the rest of the world where they still have one red telephone box in the town square and there is an annual homemade jam competition where everyone greets everyone by name and the milkman comes round and asks how your auntie is doing. Anyway, this village Tadfield is tiny, I can't imagine why anywhere like that needs an airbase. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

OK, so my mother dear Harriet Dowling is at the airbase and I decide that I simply can’t wait any longer and must be born immediately but gasp! oh no! the airbase hospital isn’t ready yet, oh dear what should we do? Then someone mentions, what are the odds? The there's a birthing hospital run by nuns not too far from here, so my mom goes in has me easy peasy goes back to the house, the airbase. I dunno use your imaginations. 

AND THEN don't be alarmed, I found out years later, I don't have some hyper super memory of the day of my birth, AND THEN the next day, the convent burns down, and that is not the weird part, oh no, the weird part is those nuns. I know you were all dying to know why I was named by nuns, in that convent, those sweet pious nuns who brought precious little me into this world, were an order of Satanic nuns. 

Let that just sink in for just a second. 

SATANIC NUNS. 

Can you imagine learning that your midwife was a Satanic nun? I think I was cursed, and I really mean that. It's quite a relief actually, maybe the world is actually against me, it goes to explain quite a bit of my childhood and a little stretch in college but there are a few things at work there if you know what I mean. 

SATANIC NUNS PEOPLE. 

How are their enough satanic nuns that they have their own Covent, how do they recruit or do they trick absent minded regular nuns? Is there a satanic Pope or do they just do the opposite of what the regular Pope says? I have so many questions...

I like to think I've always taken the occult thing with a bit of humour, what other option is there with a name like Warlock, you have to lean into it really don'tcha. So let me tell you about a time when I was at college, in the USA mind you, when my friends and I tried to summon a demon.

I did my undergrad in the USA and my Masters in London.

I made friends with a group of what I’m going to affectionately call oddballs, not nerd nerds, not stoners, not LARPers, just sort of people really, but you when you meet someone and the weirdness of them doesn’t quite leak out yet. It’s like their carrying a huge pile of marbles in their hands and every so often one falls out and they say something that’s kiiinda iffy but you can choose to ignore it. 

And then one day you realise all of the weird things are related and it all crashes into you at once and you’re like damn. How did I not put this together until now? Ok, I want to take a minute to be clear about this, I know is sounds like I’m leading up to the revelation that they were Nazi’s or white supremacists, I know that’s what it sounds like I'm leading up to but I’m not. What a terrible place to bring that up.

‘Hello, welcome to the show, now listen to me talk about how I was indoctrinated into the KKK’ that is not funny my friends, that is a terrible series of life choices that I wouldn’t share with a room of strangers. I have plenty of other strange things and terrible life choices that I could be sharing with you this evening.

So what I’m trying to get at is that my friends in College were not popular, they were weird, in a how are you in an institution of higher education and you still think that the moon landing was faked sorta way. One of our friends was a Physics major, between you and me I don’t think that they had that much in common. 

So demons, we tried to summon a demon, in college, we thought it would be fun, I don’t know how many of us expected it to work, but as I said my name was Warlock, I had a certain, painstakingly curated look that I had going on and was not going to back down from a little occultism. Lean into it, like I said. 

So we all show up at the girl’s apartment and I sorta got the sense she was way too into it, so we set up all of the stuff that we were told to bring, apparently if we were going to summon and trap a demon we needed salt to stop it from escaping and hurting us, and snacks to appease it. 

She told us those were the options for a demon, brownies or the immortal souls of four students, I’m just imagining these demons in hell standing round the vending machine complaining, all, 

‘Hey Larry how you doing?’ 

‘Balthazar is that you? Been a while, how the devil are you?’

‘Aay, every time Larry, you’re a riot, It’s been going well, hey are you still in the second circle?’

‘No, it’s been ages, actually I’ve been demoted, I now run the sulphur pits, got my own office and everything’

‘Sounds like a pretty sweet gig. What do you want from the vending machine, my treat.’

‘If you’re buying I won’t argue, they better have restocked, when I was on second they only had human souls’

‘Urgh, so cheap’

‘Right? They better have Twinkies’

Like those are the only two options for a demon. Anyway you get the idea. So we set up all this stuff and she starts chanting and nothing is happening, I don’t think anyone is really that surprised. 

Then there’s weird burning smell which isn’t really anything out of the ordinary for her place and we’re all just thinking it’s the kitchen one flat over, so we’re all sitting around her table waiting for something to happen, and we had to set up in the kitchen because she didn’t want us getting salt all over the place.

Anyway, so there’s burning smell, and we can’t work out where it’s coming from and then smoke is coming out of the top of the stove, not the oven, the top of the stove right and rolling out onto the floor and it moves to where we are all sitting and sort of sinks to the floor and moves around the chairs.

The funny thing was that it didn’t go inside the circle that we made with the salt, so all this smoke is summoned outside of our demon circle. Then there’s a rumbling hissing noise, and it sounds familiar but I couldn’t place it at the time. And the girl whose idea this was is getting pretty worked up at this point, because this demon apparently is not in our control because it’s not in the circle. 

So this smoke sort of snakes around the edge of this ring that we’ve made and is making this hissing noise which sounds a bit like words if you don’t concentrate too hard, it’s grumbling things that sound like ‘amateurs, shoddy job, half baked attempt’

So summoning girl has stopped her reciting at this point and tries to reassure us all that ‘we don’t need to worry, that everything is going to be fine’ and then the smoke says ‘don’t listen to her, listen to me’ and it hits me why the hissing is so familiar, it sounds like my Nanny. My freaking Scottish Nanny from when I was six years old and living in England so at that point I realise that we shouldn’t trust whatever snacks that Dennis brought with him. I’m thinking they’re not your average Walmart brownies if catch my drift.

But then the fire alarm went off and the sprinkler system soaked all of us so we got to keep our souls I guess, lucky escape? Who’s to say?

If demon summoning and recreational drug wasn’t to your taste then you are going to have a hell of a time with the next bit, excuse the pun. No I take that back, it’s my show, the pun gets to stay.

So let me tell you about my Nanny when I was growing up. Yes I had a British Nanny, Scottish if you want to be picky, and believe me over there they are VERY picky. 

Yes, I had a Nanny growing up and I think she was the devil. 

OK so that’s a touch dramatic, I don't think she was THE devil, that a bit egocentric of me really, I'm not claiming that The Devil took time out of their busy schedule of to babysit me for the first half a dozen years of my life, but I'm just saying that there were a lot of strange goings on around me that I thought were pretty normal at the time. 

I had a pretty great childhood all things considered, sure there were some weird bits, but I when you’re a child you’re still learning how everything works so you can’t really separate weird bits from the new bits, you know? There’s no distinction between this is something I have not seen before and this is complete insanity. So when I was growing up, I just thought the things that happened and the people I knew were normal. 

But as it turns out, my normal is not a good base line, did I mention Warlock. Satanic Nuns. Good Lord, I don’t think there is enough therapy in the world to help me process that. 

So, my Nanny, I'm not saying she was evil or anything, she wasn't mean to Me. I mean, I loved her to death, she would either call me Hellspawn or Dearie, which when you think about it are like completely the opposite ends of the scale for terms of endearment right?!

She had this strange way of talking to me like she was telling me a secret, like everything she said had a hidden meaning that was just between us. I remember this time she was talking about comparing apples and pears. Something along the lines of ‘When you choose between an apple and a pear, dearie, if you choose the apple you don’t know whether it will be crisp and sour or if it will be tender and sweet. Pears are soft and juicy and they bruise very easily, so you see pears aren’t as complicated as apples because you know what you’re getting. Apples are a choice to take a risk but pears are an acceptance of the things that you already know, do you understand what I’m saying my little Hellspawn?’ and then I would said ‘Thanks Nanny, I’m five,’ but she had this really smooth Scottish brogue so everything she said sounded pretty wise to me. 

And she and the gardener had this totally weird dynamic where they acted like they hated each other but weren’t very good at it, like the first half of a rom-com where they would always disagree but make a point to spend time together. And Nanny ALWAYS has something to say about the garden, something technical about the soil or pruning the bushes incorrectly. And then Brother Francis would say that all of God’s creatures were deserving of love and reverence even slugs and aphids. And Nanny would hiss that they would need a small miracle to protect the roses from the number of aphids in the garden and Brother Francis would laugh and say that’s ‘it’s not my job to tempt them my dear’ and then he turn to me and smile and say ‘Don’t listen to her, young master Warlock you listen to me’ and when I would talk to her about the pigeons and the spiders in the garden she would say that they weren’t worthy of my time and attention and that I was going to rule the world one day so ‘Don’t listen to him, dearie, listen to me’ I don’t think she hated animals exactly, I just think it was her way of trying to make me more ambitious.

I think she had magical powers too, you know like in Mary Poppins, you’ve all seen Mary Poppins right? Where they have magical adventures and then she gaslights the children and pretends it didn’t happen. Well it was a bit like that. She would be in two places at once or things would suddenly appear. But I just though hey, I guess my Nanny is magic, just like Mary Poppins and that’s more fun than Jeffrey’s nanny who is boring or Carla’s nanny who my Mom says wears skirts that are too short.

And then when I was about six years old my Nanny left and I got two tutors instead. A Mr Harrison and a Mr Cortese and I one hundred percent believe that Mr Harrison was the same person as my Nanny. 

The two of them looked exactly the same except she came back and was now a man, which everyone thought was the only reason she couldn’t be the tutor, everyone kept saying ‘don't be silly Warlock Mr Harrison is a man. Don't be ridiculous Warlock. I know your Nanny Ashtoreth was a bit on the strict side and she was rather tall but there is no need to be rude. It's not nice to say things like that Warlock.’ 

Now let's not beat around the issue here, I am not casting any sort of judgement about a person who identifies outside of the gender binary. I am not judging anyone’s life choices. I'm a young person, I can be as the kids say, 'woke' about it, but I’m just saying that I spent the first 6 years of my life with my Nanny. So I know that first she was a lady and then a man showed up and he was the same person and he was a man, but nobody seemed to believe me. 

So I’ll talk you through what happened when I got my new tutors, So there was Mr Cortese, he was pleasant looking really, sort of soft features, old fashioned sense of style. And I said ‘Hello, Mr Cortese’ and then there was Mr Harrison. And my mother introduced Mr Harrison and I said ‘Hello Nanny’. And my mother apologised and fussed and I legitimately thought it was some sort of game that I wasn’t getting the hang of, so my mother tried again and she said this is Mr Harrison and I said ‘Hello Mr Harrison’ and she explained what they would be teaching me. 

Then first lesson I sit down with Mr Harrison and he starts tell me about I can’t even remember what and I’m just sat there staring, waiting for the punch line, waiting for him to call be Dearie in that funny secret tone, but nope, no acknowledgement, nada. He didn’t correct me when I called him Nanny though. 

***

**Author's Note:**

> Comment and Kudos if you like!


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